Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(1)

September 2008
doi:10.1598/JA AL.52.1.2
© 2008 International Reading Association
(pp. ???–???)

c o m m e n t a r y

Why Bother Theorizing Adolescents’ Online

Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?

Donna E. Alvermann

O ne indicator of the current interest in adolescent literacy is the number

of different attributes that term connotes. For example, think of the last time
you received an inquiry about adolescent literacy and the struggling reader or
an invitation to address the topic of adolescent literacy in relation to online
social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook. Maybe you’ve been
asked to speak to a local school board or curriculum committee on the use
of graphic novels and comics with students in the middle grades. Or perhaps
you’re developing a new graduate seminar that will focus on young people
and their literacies in informal settings, such as museums and public libraries.
In these and any number of other examples that come to mind, adolescent
literacy is linked to social practices that involve reading and writing as well as
other modes of communication (e.g., still and moving images, sound, embod-
ied performances) in which young people engage.
Of late, these practices are parts of larger conversations going on in
fields other than our own. For instance, faculty in the Institute of Creative
Technologies at De Montfort University in the United Kingdom are look-
ing to transliteracy as a potential unifying perspective on what it means to
be literate in the 21st century (Thomas et al., 2007). A 2010 goal of the
Transliteracies Project (2007) is to “produce a ‘framework of online reading’
that blueprints...recommendations for best practices, and implementation and
evaluation procedures for an integrated range of technological, social, and
humanistic approaches to ‘improving’ online reading” (¶1).
Of course, a unifying perspective with umbrella-like recommendations
has the potential to legitimate particular, or even generic, teaching practic-
es associated with online literacies—a potential that Lankshear and Knobel
(2006) viewed with caution, especially if the notion of transliteracy were to
metamorphose into a posttypographic equivalent of “basic literacy” standards
from the world of print. That debate aside, literacy practices associated with
8
the Internet (e.g., blogging, gaming, instant messaging, social networking)
are topics of discussion at annual conferences that span the globe. Yet theoriz-
ing the role of these online literacies and the implications they may have for
classroom teachers, teacher educators, and researchers
whose work is focused at the middle and high school
level is rarely a topic of discussion in practitioner jour-
nals, or at least in the ones I read on a regular basis.
The Point of This Commentary
A proposal such as this one—to theorize how at-
tending to adolescents’ online literacies might inform
our work—invites questions. For instance, Why not
simply accept those literacies for what they appear to
be—something apart from formal schooling and best
not co-opted by us, no matter how noble our intent?
A reasonable stance, yet one that fails to dampen my
interest (as a former junior high social studies teacher,
now teacher educator and researcher) in literacies so
powerfully motivating that young people are more
and more willing to invest a substantial amount of
time and effort in creating content to share with oth-
ers online.
discrepancies), 93% treated the Internet as a venue for
social interaction. Of those young people who identi-
fied as having online access, 64% reported participat-
ing “in one or more...content-creating activities on
the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar
survey at the end of 2004” (p. i). More than half had
created profiles on a social networking site such as
MySpace or Facebook.
As impressive as these numbers are, they do not
represent all adolescents and certainly not all their
literate activities. Neither do they agree completely
with findings from studies conducted in the United
Kingdom (Livingstone & Bober, 2005) and in the
United States with Latino/a youths (Moje, Overby,
Tysvaer, & Morris, 2008).
Nonetheless, the PEW Report does raise ques-
tions about what we may have overlooked, or failed to
consider relevant, in young people’s penchant for cre-
ating online content that could have a bearing on how
we teach and research adolescent literacy both now

According to a report released in December 2007
as part of the PEW Internet & American Life Project
(Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, & Smith, 2007), the use
of social media—blogging; working on a webpage for
school or for personal use; sharing original content
such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos; and remix-
ing online content to create new texts—is central to
the lives of many young people living in the conti-
nental United States. Of the 935 adolescents between
the ages of 12–17 who were interviewed by phone
in a nationally representative sample (with the results
weighted to correct for known sociodemographic
Why Bother Theorizing Adolescents’ Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?
and in the future. For instance, What drives young
people to create online content? How unique is the
culture of online literacies? Do adolescents’ online lit-
eracies have implications for the research and teaching
of literacy?
These three questions, which I use to structure
the rest of the commentary (see Table 1 for brief defi-
nitions of some key terms), look to research that has
theorized adolescents’ online literacies in relation
to classroom practice. Although answers are partial
and at best tentative, they suggest a few clues as to
why classroom practice and research have been slow

Table 1    Key Terms

Term
Adolescence/adolescent literacy
Online literacies
Classroom practice
Definition
Adolescence, as used here, makes use of Lesko’s (2001) sociohistorical deconstruction of arbitrary age categoriza-
tions. Thus, rather than viewing adolescents as not-yet-adults, I see them as having at least some degree of agency
within a larger collective of social practices. Adolescent literacy, by extension, is more than an embryonic form of
reading and writing; it encompasses a vast array of social practices in which communication is central (Hinchman &
Sheridan-Thomas, 2008).
The socially mediated ways of generating meaningful content through multiple modes of representation (e.g.,
language, imagery, sounds, embodied performances) to produce digital texts (e.g., blogs, wikis, zines, games, personal
webpages) for dissemination in cyberspace.
The word practice, as in classroom practice, refers to the cultural ways in which teachers make sense of what they
do, including their interactions with students. These ways involve attitudes, feelings, values, and social relation- 9
ships, which, while not readily observable, nonetheless serve to regulate who gets to produce or access what textual
content, at what point, and for what purposes (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Street, 1995).
 to keep pace with the proliferation in young people’s
online literacies.
What Drives Young People to Create
Online Content?
When I was teaching junior high social studies many
years ago, one of the surest signs of student engage-
ment would come in the form of a course-related proj-
ect that had not been previously assigned. Thus, the
day a drawn-to-scale blueprint of a Roman banquet
hall showed up on my desk, I took it as a clear signal
that Jerry [all names are pseudonyms] was trying to
tell the rest of the class and me that the school’s gym-
nasium was hardly a suitable venue for the forthcom-
ing Roman banquet—an annual event that marked
the culminating point of our unit on the Roman
Empire.
Thinking back on that day in 1965, I have to
wonder how Jerry would have modified or shared
his blueprint had he had a laptop computer with
Internet access at his disposal. Would he have linked
it to some visuals on his home page? Included sound?
Uploaded digital images of it to Flickr.com? Would
he have joined, like so many young people today, a
virtual community in which creating content for so-
cial, aesthetic, and informational purposes is a com-
September 2008
mon literacy practice? And if so, would pooling that
community’s resources and making connections
across multiple media platforms have produced a par-
ticipatory culture for learning that is difficult, if not
impossible, to duplicate off line? From a researcher’s
52(1)
perspective, is there merit in studying how learning is
accomplished in a participatory culture where young
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
people collectively pool their resources?
I believe there is, and other literacy researchers
(Hagood, 2008; Moje, 2007) seem to agree. Although
the theories we use to inform our work may differ,
the implications we draw for classroom practice and
further research are strikingly similar. The message
is consistent: Young people are tirelessly editing and
remixing multimodal content they find online to
share with others, using new tools to show and tell,
and rewriting their social identities in an effort to be-
10
come who they say they are. In a nutshell, adolescents
with access to the Internet are developing the litera-
cies that will serve them well in the years to come.
Unfortunately, not all young people are able to par-
ticipate in this exciting, socially networked world, an
issue that is indeed worrisome and one I will address
in a later section.
Remixing Multimodal Content to Create New
Texts
Texts in cyberspace are well suited for editing and re-
making. With a few clicks of the mouse, “old” online
texts transform into content that is often fresh and
compelling, at least to its creator and to those whose
attention the maker hopes to garner and keep. Thus,
even the simple act of cutting and pasting from sound
clips, images, video games, podcasts, message boards,
newsgroups, and blogs (short for weblogs or online
journals) could result in a highly refined parody,
say, of a particular event or process (e.g., electing a
president or prime minister). I chose this example be-
cause I can easily imagine such content, especially if
student–created, fitting well into a high school civics
class or a current events lesson at the middle school
level. Yet based on what I know from the research on
adolescents’ online literacies, few texts of this kind
find their way into school classrooms. Why?
One reason, supposedly, is that young people are
often fans of content thought to be inappropriate (or
irrelevant at best) to most school curricula. Although
not trivial, this reason would seem to stem more from
an educator’s point of view than a student’s. From my
reading of the research on adolescents’ online litera-
cies, I would say that audience appeal (e.g., having
a space in which to affiliate with others who share
interests or goals) and time for in-depth discussions
around a finished text (perhaps one that was collab-
oratively authored) are the main factors in young peo-
ple’s decisions to create content destined for informal
sharing after school.
Increasingly researchers are pointing to the cen-
trality of audience as a major contributor to adoles-
cents’ fascination with self-created online content.
Using fandom for part of her theoretical lens, Black
(2007) conducted a three-year ethnography of fe-
male English-language learners (ELLs) who affiliated
around a common interest in fanfiction—a term for
stories that fans of an original work (e.g., Harry Potter)
write by using the settings, characters, and plot from
the original to imagine and create different situations
that sometimes include curious mixes across genres
and media. Thus, the resulting “new” stories could
conceivably feature content that has Harry Potter
meeting Peter and Edmund from C. S. Lewis. To give
some indication of the diversity of the content, peo-
ple, and literacies involved with sites such as fanfic-
tion.net, where writers review each other’s work and
request stories from their favorite fanfiction authors,
Black (2007) drew from her ethnographic study:
While writing [fanfiction], the adolescent ELL may be
carrying on several conversations at once via instant-
messaging programs, chat rooms, and/or discussion
boards [with other fanfiction writers] located in her
former hometown in China, her new hometown in
North America, and other such diverse places.... She
also may be drawing from her knowledge of academic
forms of writing, different media genres, as well as her
knowledge of English, Mandarin Chinese, and per-
haps Japanese to construct the text. (p. 386)
An affinity space (Gee, 2003, 2004) such as this one,
in which people with common interests spend huge
amounts of time discussing content, revising, and re-
questing more of the same from valued others in their
virtual world, exists in sharp contrast to much of the re-
cent research on marginalized and unmotivated ELLs.
Having a space in which to interact around re-
mixed texts with an appreciative audience was also a
key finding in Chandler-Olcott and Mahar’s (2003)
study of two adolescent girls who shared an interest
in fanfiction that featured Japanese animation (an-
ime). Theorized within a multiliteracies perspective,
this study provides a concrete example of the major
role that visualization, imagery, and the arts play in
adolescents’ creation and dissemination of online con-
tent. One girl constructed a series of anime-focused
homepages, while the other contributed to an online
mailing list by scanning copies of her own artwork,
inspired by her favorite anime shows, for the express
purpose of receiving feedback from knowledgeable
others on the list. Both demonstrated they knew the
importance of attracting and maintaining other peo-
ple’s attention in cyberspace, a skill that is far from
trivial in today’s attention economy where “attention,
unlike information, is inherently scarce...[with some
economists like Goldhaber predicting] that the human
capacity to produce material things [will outstrip] the
net capacity to consume the things that are produced”
(Lankshear & Knobel, 2002, pp. 20–21).
Using New Tools to Show and Tell
Until recently, language (speech and writing) went
largely unchallenged as the communicative mode of
choice among literate people. While language ruled,
schools quite naturally developed core curricula that
conditioned students to choose writing as the chief
means of representing ideas they wanted to commu-
nicate. In cultures where language predominates, it is
customary to find a prevalence of tools better suited
for telling than for showing (Kress, 2003). Yet, as
one reviewer of this commentary noted, size, color,
and placement on the screen in the showing tells, and
it does so using less text than would be the case if
there were no visuals. In some ways, then, showing
is telling.
Why Bother Theorizing Adolescents’ Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?
In this era of page to screen shifts and multimodal
texts, new tools for working with various modes of
communication are producing a change in the way
that young people are choosing to construct mean-
ingful texts for themselves and others in their affinity
spaces.
For instance, research coming out of the United
Kingdom and Australia, among other places, demon-
strates that adolescents with access to the Internet are
using downloadable editing tools to assist with sound
production and various other design elements (im-
age, gesture, symbol, and color) necessary for creating
computer games that range from the fairly complex
to a more garden variety. Even in designing games,
there is ample attention given to language as a mode
of communication. According to Burn (2007), ado-
lescents use “writing in a literal sense, as part of the
design process, as an integral element of games, and
as forms of interpretive writing of the kind performed
by game fans” (p. 50). Because the authoring software
for many computer games is narrative based, Burn’s
research focused on how the two genres work to-
gether and yet retain their separate properties. From
this work, he and his colleagues at the University of
London theorized a notion of game literacy that took 11
into account peripheral literacies, such as writing a
backstory (the history behind a game’s plot), scripts,
 and walkthroughs (directions on how to play the
game).
Based on her work with Australian youths, Beavis
(2007) documented how youth-designed, multimodal
computer games were stretching the boundaries of
narrative writing, at least as conceptualized within a
print-centric mode. Specifically, she asked,
What happens to writing and the tasks it is asked to
do in the context of multimodal literacies? The chal-
lenge of bringing together written and digital forms
of representation and design in the classroom does
not mean that the strengths and values of the written
form should be cast aside: in particular, its capacity to
provide for ref lection and inwardness. It does require,
however, a rethinking of the relationship between the
two, possibilities for combinations of form, an open-
ness towards what young people are trying to achieve,
and an exploration together, between teachers and
students, of the dimensions and possibilities of both
worlds. (p. 42)
During my own work with adolescents in after-school
media clubs (Alvermann, Hagood, & Williams, 2001;
Alvermann & Heron, 2001; Alvermann, Marshall,
McLean, Bishop, & Kirk, 2007), I observed first-
hand how designing personal websites, gaming, and
downloading songs require decoding and encoding a
September 2008
complex mix of images, words, sounds, symbols, and
genre-specific syntax—content that is not taught in
the typical language arts classroom. Adolescents who
create visually and aurally narrated texts that rely on
viewers’ and listeners’ imaginations for interpretation
52(1)
have had to teach themselves to use technically so-
phisticated authoring software.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
For example, by installing readily available soft-
ware, such as Fruity Loops Studio 6, and downloading
songs from www.limewire.com, Brad (a high school
student in one of our studies) essentially transformed
his laptop computer into a synthesizer keyboard, a
mixing board, and a virtual recording studio. The fact
that he shared his newly learned skills with friends
(both virtual and real) so that that they, too, could
compose songs or other texts rich in multimodal con-
tent for online dissemination came as no surprise.
12
What is surprising, however, is the scarcity of research
that examines the potential of new tools for showing
and telling in the school curriculum.
Rewriting Social Identities
Young people who portray themselves in the virtual
world as being someone other than the person that
people in the real world perceive them to be may have
stories to tell that teachers, teacher educators, and re-
searchers have not been privy to in the past. These
portrayals can be accomplished through an avatar (a
visual representation of an online role-playing gamer’s
character), through multimodal self-representations in
online social networking sites such as MySpace, and
through websites constructed to disrupt images of fe-
male activists and punk rockers that falsely typecast
them. Examples of all three follow.
In one of her research projects focusing on iden-
tity and literacy in a digital age, Thomas (2007) docu-
mented at length how the avatars that 30 adolescent
girls selected in an online role-playing community
were embodied performances of their identities. Of
particular interest for this commentary were findings
from Thomas’s research that point to the centrality
of language in online identity construction and per-
ception. For example, the girls’ ability to manipulate
words in socially constructing alternate identities was
every bit as important as experimenting with the ava-
tar’s physical features. The storylines through which
young people exist in online spaces are highly social
as are the literacy skills they employ.
This finding, based in Thomas’s research, took
on personal relevance for me when, in the course of
writing this commentary, I ventured into Second Life
(SL), an Internet-based virtual world where residents
network socially while exchanging ideas, goods, and
services. There, my avatar, a female Goth, met a real-
life (RL) friend of mine, Achariya Rezak, a doctoral
student who has been an SL resident for quite some
time and thus has accumulated certain “material”
goods (e.g., a light-rail car that makes it easier to get
around in SL). When my friend offered my avatar a
ride one evening, I learned something about my on-
line literacy and eye–hand coordination skills. Not
only was my avatar’s response too long (as my fingers
nimbly keyed in a paragraph-length, fully punctuated
answer in the game’s dialogue box), but my avatar
also missed jumping aboard when the rail car came
to a short stop. The arrows for physically positioning
my avatar, the words, the embodied performance, the
lightning speed at which I was expected to respond—
suffice it to say, I’m working to improve my SL lit-
eracy practices these days.
Online social networking communities such as
MySpace provide opportunities for young people to
write, read, and speak their worlds into existence.
They also afford windows into the processes young
people use to reinvent themselves, as Kirkland (in
press) demonstrated in his portrayal of Derrick, a high
school youth who created content in MySpace that
belied labels of “disinterested and struggling writer”
in his 12th-grade composition class. Working from
a critical theory perspective, Kirkland documented
over a three-year period how Derrick’s online com-
positions were well received in a virtual world where
he interfaced digital audio and video technologies
with stylized African American spellings to convey
his identity as a socially conscious rapper and poet:
You know I started using MySpace to keep in touch
with my friends. Everybody I knew had a MySpace
page, except for me. So I had to get one. When I got
one, it was like a new world. There wasn’t that many
rules. There was no teacher telling you what to do,
telling you what you could and could not do. You were
free to be creative. I mean...you could do and even be
anything you wanted. So MySpace changed the game
for me. You know I’m a rapper. So MySpace gave me
a place to showcase my talent. I am also a poet, and I
was like...I can even post my poems on MySpace too.
The more I played around with it, the more I wrote
because I had somewhere to put my writing that made
me feel good about it, you know. (n.p.)
Guzzetti (2006) worked from the perspective of
literacy as a social practice to frame her case study of
two young women who negotiated their social iden-
tities through interactions (surfing, reading, posting
their own content) on three different kinds of web-
sites—distros (online distribution centers), sites for
do-it-yourselfers (e.g., message boards, electronic dis-
cussion lists), and sites for touring underground rock
bands. Using data obtained from interviews, observa-
tions, and discourse analysis, Guzzetti showed how
one girl (a self-identified activist) and the other (a punk
rocker) used the interactive cybersites as entry points
to gain acceptance and recognition in various affinity
groups and to obtain information that produced them
as “tech savvy” and “global citizens” prepared to fend
for themselves.
In sum, these young people’s penchant for cre-
ating online content that was easily distributed and
used by others with similar interests was facilitated in
part by their ability to remix multimodal texts, use
new tools to show and tell, and rewrite their social
identities. This capacity, while noteworthy, leaves
unaddressed the degree to which adolescents’ online
literacies have relevance for classroom practice, a topic
taken up in a later section of this commentary.
How Unique Is the Culture of Online
Literacies?
Virginia Heffernan, a columnist for The New York
Times Magazine, admitted to feeling somewhat defen-
sive after viewing the PBS documentary “Growing
Up Online,” which aired on January 22, 2008.
Ref lecting on her own coming-of-age in what she
Why Bother Theorizing Adolescents’ Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?
called “the Internet before the Internet” (a primitive
computer network of the 1970s), Heffernan (2008) as-
serted that online social networking is
less a walk on life’s wild side than it is a game like
backgammon.... Successfully “playing the computer,”
as [she] used to call it, requires a set of skills: social in-
tuition, inventive self-presentation, speedy and clever
writing, discretion, intricate etiquette, self-protection.
(n.p.)
Regardless of how much we, as teachers and teacher
educators, might agree with Heffernan and admire
the writing skills, inventiveness, and social intuitions
exhibited by adolescents who create online content,
these markers of student expertise are given scant at-
tention in our everyday classroom practices, at the
postsecondary level as well as at the middle and sec-
ondary levels (Alvermann, 2002; Dressman & Wilder,
2008; Honan, 2008; Wilber, 2008). The main reason
for this is the perception that young people are al-
ready immersed in the Internet and thus do not need
to spend additional time there during school hours.
Another reason has to do with competing dis-
courses. For example, in a three-year study of a fully
wired high school, Leander (2007) observed what he 13
described as “dueling discourses,” or the multiple and
conf licting ways of doing school in online and off line
 social spaces. In that school, where every student had
a laptop, teachers’ attempts to honor students’ online-
created content were often in conf lict with centuries-
old notions of what constitutes “quality” information.
As one teacher recalled, somewhat nostalgically,
You know, at first we had to make [students] do cer-
tain things with technology.... [It] used to be the kids
automatically went to books.... Well now it’s the op-
posite. They immediately go to the online sources and
you have to say, “you have to look at so many books or
printed articles or things like that.” (p. 33)
The predominance of print in academic circles is
longstanding and firmly engrained in school curricu-
la. Although it may be the case that images are push-
ing words off the page and screen in online spaces
(Hull & Zacher, 2004; Kress, 2003), in the classrooms
where I visit and work (my own included), print-
centric practices prevail—to such a degree, in fact,
that I sometimes marvel at how young people who
are immersed in complex digital worlds tolerate our
insistence on reading and writing linear texts devoid
of hyperlinked multimodal content and opportunities
for social networking.
What unspoken, unexamined assumptions cause
us to see as “natural” the dominance of print in a
September 2008
little social, cultural, and economic change since the
advent of cyberspace, except for one thing—technol-
ogies in use are greater in number and more sophisti-
cated. The second assumes that the world has changed
significantly as a result of individuals’ eagerness to
participate in a networked society in which digital
technologies enable new ways of being and accom-
plishing things. These two mindsets, while engaging
dichotomous ways of thinking, are helpful nonetheless
in that they highlight some of the creative tensions at
the intersection of online literacies and contemporary
classroom practices.
Consider, for example, how the first mindset’s fo-
cus on locating expertise and authority in individuals
(e.g., teachers and teacher educators) and institutions
(e.g., schools and universities) is challenged by the sec-
ond mindset, which holds that expertise and authority
are collectively distributed, thereby blurring distinc-
tions between teachers and learners—especially when
the learners are digital insiders and function more like
teachers and producers than simply consumers. It is
this latter frame of mind that points to the uniqueness
of the culture of online literacies, at least in my opin-
ion. In addressing the notion of collective intelligence,
Henry Jenkins (2006c), who is the Director of the
Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter

world that is growing more multimodal by the sec-

de Florez Professor of Humanities at Massachusetts
ond? If one answer to that question is the fear of losing
Institute of Technology, argued that “none of us can
print literacy, “then we may find ourselves school-
know everything; each of us knows something; and
ing young people in literacy practices that disregard
we can put the pieces together if we pool our resourc-
the vitality of their literate lives and the needs they
es and combine our skills” (p. 4).
52(1)

will have for their literate and social futures at home,

Of particular note is a white paper that Jenkins
at work, and in their communities” (Lewis & Fabos,
(2006a) wrote on the challenges of participatory cul-
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

2005, p. 498). Most likely, as with many dichotomies,

it is not a matter of which element in the binary (in
this case, print-only text versus multimodal text) will
prevail but rather of how we perceive one element in
relation to the other.
Participatory Culture and Online Literacies
To understand the culture of online literacies, I find
it helpful to review the two mindsets that Lankshear
and Knobel (2007b) proposed as a way of account-
ing for the impact of cyberspace on life as we have
14
known it up to the present time. The first mindset
assumes that the contemporary world has undergone
ture for the express purpose of sparking discussions
among educators at all levels about the need to change
classroom practices in ways that would recognize
young people’s interests and expertise in creating on-
line content. In that paper, which appears in serialized
form on his blog (henryjenkins.org), Jenkins defined
participatory culture as having these five characteris-
tics (¶16):
1. Relatively low barriers to artistic expression
and civic engagement
2. Strong support for creating and sharing one’s
creations with others
 3. S ome type of informal mentorship whereby
what is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices
4. Members believe that their contributions
matter
5. Members feel some degree of social connec-
tion with one another (at the least they care
what other people think about what they have
created).
Despite the euphoric ring a participatory culture has
for me, I am mindful that, in the midst of celebrating
young people’s enthusiasm for creating online content,
issues of access are sometimes overlooked or mini-
mized. On the other hand, I know teachers who, in
an attempt to level the playing field for students with-
out access to the Internet, systematically avoid making
assignments that require students to go online.
Who Gets to Participate?
A participatory culture that supports the creation of
online content also raises expectations among young
people that the necessary technology and related re-
sources will be available for accomplishing the kinds
of content they are interested in producing. Access
is pretty much taken for granted. In fact, accord-
ing to Danah Boyd, a fellow at the Berman Center
for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the
younger generation views online culture not as a sep-
arate place “but as just a sort of continuation of their
existence” (cited in Lee, 2008, n.p.). Although this
assumed nexus may be the case for those adolescents
fortunate enough to have home access to the Internet,
I doubt seriously that it applies to those who must de-
pend on rationed, or even metered, time on a public
computer. Such disparity has tangible effects educa-
tionally, for as Jenkins (2006b) cogently pointed out,
What a person can accomplish with an outdated ma-
chine in a public library with mandatory filtering soft-
ware and no opportunity for storage...pales in com-
parison to what [can be accomplished] with a home
computer with unfettered Internet access, high band-
width, and continuous connectivity. (n.p.)
Providing computers, software, and high band-
width access, however, rarely offsets other limitations
associated with the digital divide. Hardware malfunc-
tions that occur outside the warranty period are often
too expensive for families of low income to fix, con-
nectivity problems go unreported (or if reported, they
go unattended), and limited leisure time in which
to learn from tech-savvy friends is common among
young people who need to work part-time jobs on
weekends and after school (Alvermann et al., 2007; cf.
Guzzetti & Gamboa, 2005). In addition to these logis-
tical concerns, there are issues of access that stem from
inadequate exposure to what Lankshear and Knobel
(2007b) have termed the right “ethos stuff ”—or the
set of conditions known to foster participatory and
collaborative online learning. When school- or dis-
trictwide policies restrict what teachers (who perhaps
themselves are high-end users of technoliteracies) can
provide in the way of digital learning opportunities,
then students with limited Internet access at home fall
Why Bother Theorizing Adolescents’ Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?
even further behind their more advantaged peers.
Unique as it is in terms of its participation struc-
tures and access requirements, there are other aspects
of online literacy practices that resemble more con-
ventional ways of teaching and learning. Students
who create online content using various forms of net-
worked media need to know how to integrate print
with images, sound, animations, videos, and 3D vir-
tual spaces. If teachers and teacher educators want to
fully appreciate and comprehend the different forms
of content that their students create, it will be help-
ful to become familiar with Lemke’s (2007) approach
to reading online, which he stated in a nutshell in an
online forum, “You can’t really get at the meaning of
[various] forms piecemeal: you have to integrate the
text with its fellow-travelers, cross-contextualizing
them by one another, to get at the kinds of meanings
being made and stored” (see lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/
xmcamail.2007_01.dir/0354.html).
In sum, the culture of adolescents’ online litera-
cies is unique to some degree, but it also intersects at
various points with the goals of classroom practice and
research that target reading and writing as fundamen-
15
tally important to almost everything that goes on in
the name of teaching and learning on a daily basis.
 Do Adolescents’ Online Literacies
Have Implications for the Research
and Teaching of Literacy?
I believe they do. Communicating through images,
sounds, and digital media, when combined with print
literacy, may be changing the way we read certain
kinds of texts, but online and off line literacies are not
polar opposites; thus, to reify distinctions between
them serves mainly to limit understandings of how
each informs the other. Because many young people
growing up in a digital world will find their own rea-
sons for becoming literate—reasons that go beyond
reading and writing to acquire academic knowl-
edge—it is important to remain open to changes in
subject matter learning that will invite and extend
the literacy practices they already possess and value.
Reviews of research (Coiro et al., 2008; Reinking,
McKenna, Labbo, & Kieffer, 1998) that take into ac-
count the digital literacies that adolescents could po-
tentially bring to academic learning—if they were
encouraged to do so in ways that matter to them—are
clear on one point: The world is fast becoming so in-
formation-driven that students with access to the same
resources as teachers often know as much if not more
than their teachers about particular topics and subject
areas of study, although they may not read with the
September 2008
same critical eye as their teachers (Fabos, 2008).
The implications I draw for research and prac-
tice are categorized using a framework that Lankshear
and Knobel (2007a) devised in researching new litera-
cies. The first subcategory focuses on what I am call-
52(1)
ing the “Let’s Think About Implications.” These are
ideas that bear further scrutiny before attempting full
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
implementation. The second subcategory focuses on
what I am labeling “Classroom- and Research-Ready
Implications”; that is, these ideas are worth imple-
menting now, at least on a trial basis.
Let’s Think About Implications
If Luke (2003) is right (and I tend to think she is), the
increased availability of hypermediated digital texts is
having profound effects on how young people process
information (see also Dresang, 2005). The limitations
16
imposed by linear print processing have by now been
largely lifted so that readers and writers, with but a
few clicks of a mouse, can transport themselves and
others into a world of parallel processing that weds
linguistic texts with pictures, moving images, sym-
bols, and sounds. This shift in processing has been
accompanied by what Luke describes as a conceptual
move in education circles from collection code cur-
riculum to connection code curriculum:
Akin to Freire’s (1970) banking concept of education,
collection code curriculum implies that teachers de-
posit knowledge “bits” in students who, in turn, ac-
cumulate, indeed collect, largely disconnected disci-
pline-based facts and figures through skill-and-drill
pedagogy. By contrast [in connection code curricu-
lum], digitalized knowledge and networked environ-
ments, critical understanding of the relations among
ideas, their sources and histories, intertextual referents
and consequences, are as important if not more so than
mastery, reproduction, and recombination of discrete
facts or units of information. (p. 400)
These shifts in both processing information and
conceptualizing the curriculum have implications for
how classroom teachers think about, assess, and make
use of young people’s engagements with online con-
tent. They also have implications for altering teacher
education programs that have traditionally prepared
subject matter teachers to think about curricula as
discipline-specific silos and literacy as institutional-
ized school-like reading and writing.
Like the teaching profession, researchers are
feeling the effects of digitalized knowledge and net-
worked environments, especially in terms of the
questions they ask and the methodologies and ana-
lytic tools they choose. As Luke (2003) predicted,
generally researchers are finding it necessary to “play
catch up with the unprecedented textual and social
practices that students are already engaging with”
(p. 402) in what we once were able to conveniently
package and set aside as informal learning. However,
Vadeboncoeur’s (2005) review of research on infor-
mal learning suggested that the question that needed
asking is not what counts as learning in formal and
informal contexts but instead, “How does a particular
context contribute to learning?” (p. 272).
In sum, it could be said that young people’s cre-
ation of content for online sharing amounts to more
than simply producing and distributing their texts;
in one sense, they are pushing the boundaries in
classroom practice and research. How we respond as
teachers, teacher educators, and researchers may si-
multaneously shape, and be shaped by, the new lit-
eracies. This could mean that we use (and modify)
technologies of the new literacies to develop new the-
ories, methodologies, and practices in both teaching
and research while at the same time being open to the
possibility that the speed with which new technolo-
gies evolve may require us to lessen the grip on “any
single, static, technology of literacy (e.g., traditional
print technology)...[in order to] continuously adapt to
the new literacies required by the new technologies
that rapidly and continuously spread on the Internet”
(Coiro et al., 2008, p. 5).
Classroom- and Research-Ready Implications
Although a reasonable stance, it is not enough to sim-
ply point toward potential linkages between online
participatory culture and long-established practices
in both teaching and research. I want also to offer
a set of classroom- and research-ready implications
based on what we know from the literature that drives
young people to create online content. A commen-
tary seems to provide the kind of latitude needed for
going out on a limb, so to speak, in drawing up this
set of implications.
In my opinion, the most striking insight to be
gained from the research on adolescents’ remixing of
multimodal content to create new texts is this: Those
who create online content recognize that authorship
is neither a solitary nor completely original enterprise.
Remixing is basic to how young people go about cre-
ating “new” texts. Content area teachers and teacher
educators who are open to considering the implica-
tions of this finding could incorporate into their
regular class assignments opportunities for students
to integrate subject matter texts with available online
texts. In doing so, they could find, like Black (2008),
that adolescents who create derivative texts are “far
from being ‘mindless consumers’ and reproducers of
existing media, as they actively engage with, rework,
and appropriate the ideological messages and materi-
als of the original text” (p. xiii). In fact, I propose
that young people’s engagement with these kinds of
ideological messages and materials is central to their
becoming the critical readers and writers we say we
value. Arguably, some of the websites young people
build by using tools that enable them to show and
tell are as much about social commentary and critique
(Stone, 2007) as they are about do-it-yourself learning
for recreational purposes.
When teachers, teacher educators, and researchers
tap into young people’s interests in producing online
content, they open themselves to appreciating a wide
range of competencies that might otherwise go un-
marked in the everyday routines of unexamined class-
room and research practices. In maintaining a healthy
skepticism that theorizing adolescents’ online litera-
cies, alone, is sufficient to the task of improving learn-
ing in subject matter classrooms, I propose that we
consider a pedagogy of critical literacies as a starting
point for analyzing both online and off line texts. This
would involve creating “an awareness of how, why,
and in whose interests particular texts might work
[followed by strategies for developing] alternative
reading positions and practices for questioning and
Why Bother Theorizing Adolescents’ Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?
critiquing texts and their affiliated social formations
and cultural assumptions” (Luke & Freebody, 1997,
p. 218). Two pedagogical frameworks that encompass
building awareness and taking alternative reading po-
sitions are Green’s (1988) three-dimensional model
(operational, cultural, and critical; cf. Damico, 2005)
and Luke and Freebody’s (1997) four resources model
(code breaker, meaning maker, text user, and text an-
alyst; cf. Luke, Freebody, & Land, 2000).
Some Closing Thoughts
As a former social studies teacher, my inclination
to look to history to inform the future sent me in
search of an article I remembered reading some time
ago in JAAL. Coauthored by a father–daughter team
(Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999), it tracked the function
of print, moving images, sound, and interactive tech-
nologies in the young girls’ everyday lives both in and
out of school. Among other things, Bean and his two
daughters (then 6th and 10th graders) offered this ob-
servation: Conventional text-bound teaching in the
content areas belies how contemporary youths locate
and use information that has relevance for them.
If the point of their message went largely un- 17
heeded nearly a decade ago, it is doubtful that the
same will be the case today. With an estimated 64%
 of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 using
the Internet to create their own content (Lenhart et
al., 2007), teachers, teacher educators, and research-
ers cannot turn their backs on the inevitable. When
school work is deemed relevant and worthwhile, when
opportunities exist for students to reinvent themselves
as competent learners (even rewrite their social iden-
tities), then literacy instruction is both possible and
welcomed. But theorizing adolescents’ penchant for
creating online content is merely a start—half the
task. The other half involves asking the young people
whom we teach, conduct research on and with, and
teach about in our teacher education classes for their
input into how, or for that matter whether (cf. Beach
& O’Brien, 2008), their online literacies should be
embraced in the regular curriculum. As Kirkland (in
press) so deftly reminded us, “The work of [literacy]
instruction [is] as much about listening and learning as
it is about telling and teaching” (p. 22).
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19